As a fomer employee of Check Point, in the Australia office concur with your comments. Doubt based on my limited experience of them that they will listen, stubbornness is a strong personality trait with many in the hierarchy in the company. Your comments would be rejected and refuted in equal weight I think.
Since leaving have seen and been involved in replacing Check Point, even if only partially. Typically I see Check Point reduced to a perimeter firewall. With other vendors creeping into VPN, Intrusion, Content control, desktop security, and so on. All areas Check Point has been in or dabbled over the last 7 or so years.
Time will tell the longetivity of Check Point, my thoughts are eventually a buyout or hostile take over of them. Especially when market share continues to go down and share price falls too.
Regards
Gordon (ex Aussie employee)
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Check Point
I agree with both viewpoints. However as another former employee believe that Check Point although it should, will never move to the US. It is a pride of made in Israel thing. Gil does listen, he just will only act if it his own idea. IPS was way too little too late, the real move should have been ISS back in the day, and let them run like Sofaware as it's own company. Neoteris, another missed opportunity, that only helped Netscreen and Juniper. Interspect was a joke, and lacked key functionality to even be competitive , they looked to hardware partner Dell. Still Dell a good solid platform, but flawed in the execution of build and delivery, the main reason Check Point has great fear of being in the hardware business. They have made great stides in improving internal systems and forecasting, but ultimately this goes hand in hand with forecasting demand and just in time delivery of hardware appliances. On the other hand, I know that Check Point has some of the most talented R&D engineers, and could build anything if tasked correctly. Today's security challenges have moved from the Network to the application. Dealing with legacy applications, and dealing with remediation is today's challenge. There will never be perfect source code, that is a fact everyone must accept. Check Point would do much better to focus all ROADs (Networks) to the application. There is as we all know no more perimiter to protect, what is left is identity, access, and the application data itself, no matter how one accesses it. The one company that figures out how to completely control, and simplify the administration of this will be the dominant force in the security industry. My 2C.
The obvious question is:
Why Checkpoint? They never had any technology superiority, just clerver marketing. Cyberguard and Juniper outperfrom them.
NO TECHNOLOGY SUPERIORITY: ARE YOU KIDDING ME.
Here is a simple fact. CHECKPOINT INVENTED STATEFUL INSPECTION. This is the technology that ALL firewalls are based on. How about CLusterXL, one of their most recent patented technologies. This allows the management and load balancing of firewall processes across multiple CPU cores. How about Check Points Patented Malicious code detector. The only technology that provided DAY ZERO protection from worms such as Code Red and Nimda. Do some research, and you will find that the majority of technical advances within the Firewall, VPN, and other areas came from Check Point. Think before you speak, or better yet, read, learn, and understand the topic which you speak about.
Stiennen slams Check Point....
And then joins Fortinet (Check Point competitor) a month later. Hey Network World do you see a conflict of interest here? How about sharing that juicy tidbit with your readers. You lack credibility until you do.